In Nomine - The Lotus Land

I recently switched to using xfce on my FreeBSD desktop. Window Maker is nice but it was starting to feel a bit dated. Thus far I like xfce, but I had one problem with Terminal. Whenever I tried to resize it or switch desktops to one with Terminal open in it I could see it painstakingly render the window. Xterm and aterm didn’t exhibit this behaviour, my 3d was accelerated, and other screen drawing didn’t show problems either (do note I am using NVIDIA’s binary driver for my GeForce 8800, the nv driver from X.org is unusable at this point).

Someone pointed me at the environment variable XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1. Once added to .zshenv, properly exported on my shell and an X restart later I find Terminal to zoom along as expected. It turns out that the NVIDIA driver doesn’t properly accelerate alpha channels.

If we consider common available technology and the average use of a FreeBSD installation as desktop or server then I think these are sensible defaults for /etc/src.conf under FreeBSD 7.

WITHOUT_ATM=yes

How many of you run ATM to your FreeBSD box?

WITHOUT_BIND_DNSSEC=yes
WITHOUT_BIND_ETC=yes
WITH_BIND_LIBS=yes
WITHOUT_BIND_MTREE=yes
WITHOUT_BIND_NAMED=yes

Do you really need a full installation of BIND on your machine? In most cases you simply need a caching, recursive resolver. For this just install unbound (found in ports/dns/unbound). Do note that I did not specify WITHOUT_BIND_UTILS so tools like dig and nslookup will still be installed. Only if you need an authoratative nameserver might you want BIND. On the other hand, you might prefer to install NSD (ports/dns/nsd).

WITHOUT_BLUETOOTH=yes

Most systems will probably not use Bluetooth at all.

WITHOUT_I4B=yes

Do you even use ISDN?

WITHOUT_IPFILTER=yes

Most people I know use either ipfw or pf, so little need for ipf.

WITHOUT_IPX=yes

You seriously still use IPX? Even NetWare is IP-native nowadays.

WITHOUT_NIS=yes

I would hope most systems are using some sort of LDAP lookup nowadays. NIS seriously doesn’t scale.

WITHOUT_SENDMAIL=yes

Given the ease of configuring Postfix, why would one want to bother with the archaic syntax of Sendmail? It has served faithfully for many, many years, but its design and configuration are archaic.

Marc Balmer (of the OpenBSD Project) investigated reports of weird filesystem behaviour and found a 25-year old bug in the BSD libc implementation of readdir().

The fix should be in the trunk of all BSDs now and scheduled for merges or backports soon (e.g. see http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/lib/libc/gen/readdir.c revision 1.15’s diff).

So I was updating my input method editors (IME) from the default in Windows x64 (IME 2002) to the ones provided by Office 2007’s language packs. As explained in a previous post of mine you can install the proofing tools and input by passing LAUNCHEDBYSETUPEXE=1 to the execution of the MSI. Now, on my Windows x64 I installed the IME by installing the IME64.MSI with this added variable. The weird thing was that some applications worked flawlessly and yet others showed me the wrong number of icons or no icons at all! It turns out that these applications are 32-bits applications and need to have the 32-bits IME installed as well. So next to installing IME64.MSI of the language you want to install, you will also have to install IME32.MSI. Only after doing this will you notice the applications working as you want them.

Thinking back on it, it makes perfect sense, but while you are in the middle of working with it you keep wondering: “why?”

After having spent about 3-4 hours last night fixing up my sweetie’s PC through a VNC session I must say that Windows by itself must be one of the least desirable operating systems to keep developing for.

Aside from its braindead APIs (I am even doing driver writing, so hush) it is basically inviting malicious people to abuse a given PC. Install with terminal services on by default, refusing to allow the user to throw away files the OS designates as ‘important to the operating system’. Sure, and which files do you think a trojan or virus will target first? Not to mention having old style (on Windows 95/98/ME installs) win.ini and such files parsed for LOAD= lines. How on earth are users even supposed to know what to look for in the registry?

Furthermore, I am getting SO pissed off by software developers that think bundling ad-ware with their software is their ticket to revenue. We should, collectively, boycot such developers. I mean, if I can develop open source software and not get ANY revenue from it, why are they being so focused on putting ad stuff in? Heck, it’s a prime attack vector for machine hijacking (and we all as the world collectively wondering why the Internet might melt down).

Basically from a operating system developer as well as an application developer I can only conclude more and more how Windows and most of its software are flawed by design. And unless this attitude changes, and I am not talking about DRM or anything, I foresee Windows killing itself.

Over the last couple of days I have been busy updating a lot of support within DragonFly, think of firewire support, ATA/SATA, AC’97, bridges, PCI definitions, and so on.
Lovely stuff.

Now if only my AMD Athlon/Asus A7N8X box would boot. Something is wrong with the nexus attachment.

At the moment de-OSSGing my TenDRA sources. If you’re doing whitespace changes run md5 on the resulting object file before and after the changes. They should match.

chak de chak de chak de // Cast it off…
chak de saare gam // cast off every sorrow.
chak de chak de chak de // Cast it off…
tere sang hain hum // I’m by your side!

Chak de, from the Indian movie Hum Tum…

Of course, some people might recognise the title. Sabaku no Gaara (砂瀑の我愛羅) being a character from the anime series. The name means: Gaara of the Desert. The name Gaara (我愛羅) itself is a combination of: ga-a(i)-ra, meaning: I, love, demon. In general you could read it as: “I love myself, I am a demon.”

The kanji ‘ai’:

For some reason I love this Kanji. Consists of 13 strokes.

DragonFly is pushing along nicely, Emiel a.k.a. coolvibe has managed to get into contact with the NVIDIA guys and is now even getting prerelease drivers! Way cool. Thanks to all the people supporting DragonFly in any way, your enthousiasm is what keeps us moving along.

One of my plans for DragonFly’s support is bootable images for ISO 9660 and diskettes which do various reporting on BIOSes and the like. This should provide clues into the wonderful world of whacked implementations.

I also started work on the bdb (BSD-licensed debugger) in order to support my own work as well as DragonFly.

So I finally managed to get the box compiling world -for some reason cpp1 didn’t like -fmemoize-lookups -fsave-memoized- only to have it keel over due to Matt (Dillon) having changed something in the ATA code. And my ICH2 based chipset at work didn’t particularly like that.

Must say that Webmin is nice to use for DNS managing, but I still haven’t found a way to really use zone template files.

The Netherlands won against Latvia last night during the European Championship 2004 soccer/voetbal/futbol games with a 3 - 0 score. I must say that Latvian ladies can definately look very pretty. Also thanks to our Czechian friends for managing to keep Germany, a very strong soccer nation, under control and even winning!